There were many issues affecting international print media, including newspapers, in 1996. One issue in Asia was the matter of creating a new centre for printing. The Subic Bay Freeport Zone in the Philippines was slated to become an Asian centre. The location was seen as a good one because of the well-developed infrastructure, low labour costs, strategic location, and availability of skilled English-speaking workers. The Asian Wall Street Journal, being printed in Kuala Lumpur, claimed to be the first regional newspaper to print in Malaysia. A new English-language business daily, Asia Times, produced by Sondhi Limthongkul, the Thai chairman of Manager Media Group, competed regionally with the Asian Wall Street Journal.

Competition also spawned collaboration between media. In Japan the newspaper Sankei Shimbun and the Fuji Television Network launched an electronic news service. The Dutch newspapers De Telegraaf and De Volkskrant joined NRC Handelsblad on the Internet. In the U.K. the Reed Elsevier Group created an interactive multimedia television listings guide, TV Times, which included preview clips from major broadcast and satellite channels.

Electronic projects included AOL Europa, a joint venture between Bertelsmann and America Online to provide newspapers and magazines to European customers. Included were the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, The Sporting Life,The Independent and the Independent on Sunday, as well as the magazines GQ and Vogue. German AOL subscribers also received the magazines Stern and Geo, while French subscribers received La Tribune Desfossés and the magazines Le Nouvel Observateur and Mieux Vivre Votre Argent. The U.K. service was launched with Mirror Group Newspapers, Newspaper Publishing, and Condé Nast Publications.

In South Africa new print products were being launched, existing titles upgraded, and cover prices raised. Independent Newspapers of Ireland acquired 58% of Argus Newspapers, the biggest publisher of English-language daily newspapers in South Africa.

The international media continued to compete with domestic media. The shift to pan-European newspapers, such as the International Herald Tribune,The Wall Street Journal Europe, and the European, which targeted an upscale business elite, might not be as thorough in some respects as the domestic media, but they did provide a global environment for international advertisers. France, which advocated a stronger domestic market, complained about the expansion of international media empires. The opposite was true for Australia, however, where conservatives wanted to liberalize laws barring TV owners from holding more than 15% of a newspaper. Such a relaxation of cross-media and foreign-ownership rules would result in new companies entering the Australian market, where foreign stakes in newspapers had earlier been assessed on a case-by-case basis.

In Hungary a new law provided for partial privatization, and the state-owned national newspaper, Magyar Nemzet, was put up for sale. Changes in the law in Greece would force the media to publish rate cards, including discount combinations and commissions, which would encourage foreign competition. In Germany laws governing competition were challenged by Burda and Springer.

Price cutting, the rising cost of newsprint, fear of inflation, and high unemployment reduced the print market in Italy. In the U.K. these same factors closed Rupert Murdoch’s Today, and in France Le Nouveau Dimanche suspended publication. Pravda, which had reflected communist and Soviet thought since 1912, ceased publication in July. Two Chinese-language dailies, the Express and the United Daily News, closed.

Sweden announced plans to launch a newspaper in Poland, to be called Pulse, a variation of the parent newspaper, Dagens Industri. An English-language daily, the Peninsula, was being launched in Qatar by Da ash-Sharq, which also published an Arabic daily, ash-Sharq. The Peninsula would have a home-delivery system, a first for Qatar. Leara D. Rhodes

After a pummeling in 1995, the U.S. newspaper industry improved in 1996. There were no major newspaper closings during the year, and much of the underlying economic news was good. The bitter 17-month strike at Knight-Ridder’s Detroit (Mich.) Free Press and Gannett’s Detroit News continued in 1996, however. Both companies, which published the two papers through a joint operating agreement, had prepared well for the strike and held their hard line with the unions, even though circulation dropped. The Thomson Corp. sold more of its U.S. newspaper holdings.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, total advertising expenditures for the first three quarters of 1996 grew by 6.2% over the same period in 1995, and total advertising revenue grew by $2 billion, to $27 billion, in the same period. The price of newsprint, which had risen to a high of $750 per metric ton at the beginning of the year, was under $500 toward the end of 1996. In a major legislative victory, U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton in August signed a bill that would allow newspapers to treat most of their carriers and distributors as contractors, not employees, and thus save millions of dollars in taxes and benefits. Rising stock prices reflected these developments, although the prices represented other communications ventures as well, since most U.S. companies dominated by newspapers had been diversifying into television, radio, and other media.

Despite their image as communications-age dinosaurs, newspapers moved to the forefront of experimentation with new modes of delivering their content. By the end of 1996, the number of U.S. newspapers delivered on-line had tripled, to nearly 175. Many of these simply repackaged their contents in an on-line format, but others added new content. Media companies also began forming a complex set of partnerships with firms like Microsoft in order to enhance their on-line packages and increase their modes of delivery.

Meanwhile, journalists at some newspapers had become expert at adding to their print editorial product. A series in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the fate of the U.S. middle class, for example, was enhanced with additional information as well as games and quizzes related to the articles. Other journalists produced controversial investigative series. A series in the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, for example, claimed a connection between the rise of crack cocaine in California in the 1980s and dealers linked to the Contra rebels who, supervised by the CIA, had fought the leftist government of Nicaragua during that period. The claim was later attacked in major articles in the Los Angeles Times,Washington Post, and New York Times.

Another newspaper development that continued to spread in 1996 was the movement known as civic, or public, journalism. Its underlying argument was that civic life in the U.S. had deteriorated and that if citizens were no longer connected to civic life, they could not feel any connection to news. Thus, civic journalists aimed to reconnect readers to the public discussion of issues and problems. Critics, however, argued that in the attempt to solve problems, civic journalists were making news rather than merely covering it. One advocate of civic journalism, Cole Campbell, assumed a major position in 1996 when he became editor of the St. Louis (Mo.) Post-Dispatch.

USA Today, the national Gannett daily that had often been criticized for substituting simpleminded happy talk for more sophisticated coverage, indicated that it might be taking another direction. In 1996 it formed two in-depth reporting teams and produced notable and hard-hitting journalism, particularly in a series that analyzed the rise of arson at African-American churches in the South, a complicated story that much of the rest of the press had oversimplified. The paper’s management conceded that it had come to realize that the newspaper could attract occasional buyers with bright but weak journalism but that repeat readers--the ones advertisers liked--tended to want substance. Readers seemed to agree, for, according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations near the end of the year, USA Today had posted the largest gain of any U.S. newspaper.

The 1996 Pulitzer Prize for public service went to the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer for a series on the environmental effects of corporate farming. Robert D. McFadden of the New York Times won the award for spot news reporting. The prize for investigative reporting went to the Orange County (Calif.) Register for a series on fraud in a local fertility clinic. Robert B. Semple, Jr., of the New York Times won the prize for editorial writing, and Bob Keeler of Newsday the prize for beat reporting for a series on a church on Long Island. Alix M. Freedman of The Wall Street Journal won the award for national reporting for articles on the U.S. tobacco industry, and David Rohde of The Christian Science Monitor the award for international reporting for his discovery of Muslim mass graves in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rick Bragg of the New York Times received the prize for feature writing for a series of articles on the contemporary U.S. Laurie Garrett of Newsday achieved the honour for explanatory journalism for her reporting on the outbreak of the Ebola virus in Zaire. The award for commentary went to E.R. Shipp of the New York Daily News for her columns on racial and social issues, and the award for criticism to Robert Campbell, a writer on architecture at the Boston Globe. Jim Morin of the Miami (Fla.) Herald won the prize for editorial cartooning. Herb Caen, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, was given a special award for his many years of writing on the city. Mike Hoyt

MAGAZINES

Many established magazines moved into alternate language markets during 1996. In Latin America cross-border publications in Spanish included the business magazine Summa, which reprinted business news from such magazines as Forbes and The Economist.Newsweek launched a Spanish-language edition in Latin America. Dow Jones & Co. published the business magazine América Economia in Spanish and launched a Portuguese-language edition for Brazil with local publisher Editoria Meio & Mensagem.

U.S. publications seeking international markets included Ebony and Elle. Condé Nast Publications launched Vogue in South Korea, where Hachette Filipacchi also launched its movie magazine, Premiere. A Reader’s Digest edition was produced for Thailand, and Architectural Digest was launched in Italy.

The Russian newsweekly Ponyedelnik closed in 1996 owing to cash-flow problems. A new Russian-language newsweekly, Itogi ("Summing Up"), was subsequently launched. Itogi, which was similar to Newsweek, was produced by Newsweek, Inc., and Russia’s Most Group to be distributed in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In the Czech Republic a thriving new trade press launched more than 20 titles, ranging from Logistika ("Logistics"), a trucking and warehousing magazine, to Zdravotnicke noviny, a magazine for health care workers, to Vy ("You"), which was aimed at Czech women aged 20-35.

Some new publications in Germany included Alina, a weekly magazine targeted at women between the ages of 30 and 60, Elter Family, designed for parents with children between the ages of 3 and 15, and Men’s Health, a collaboration between Motorpresse in Stuttgart and Rodale Press of the U.S. In Belgium Sport magazine was relaunched, and the news magazine Tempo returned to Indonesia after having been banned in 1994. Leara D. Rhodes

The electronic revolution continued to change magazine publishing during 1996, with an estimated 4,000-5,000 full-text magazines on-line by the year’s end. The best-publicized on-line title in 1996 was Microsoft’s Slate--edited by Michael Kinsley, the former editor of The New Republic. The political and cultural magazine was aimed primarily at Internet users; however, there was also a 30-page paper edition. Many libraries mounted projects to provide more popular titles on-line, including the University of California libraries, whose venture, SCAN, succeeded in increasing the number of scholarly journals available through the Internet.

Publishers on the World Wide Web faced numerous problems, particularly user hostility to subscription fees. Since many magazines were still available free of charge, only a few with special appeal succeeded in charging a user fee. There were almost as many economic casualties as new sites. Web Review, one of the best-known Internet magazines, suspended publication in May owing to a lack of financial support, but it returned in September.

The proliferation of nonsensical articles in U.S. scholarly journals was emphasized by a parody that a University of Minnesota professor published as a genuine contribution to social-scientific thought in the summer issue of Social Text. The impenetrable hodgepodge of jargon passed the magazine’s editorial board. Explaining the purpose of the hoax in the June issue of Lingua Franca, the author asked, "Why should self-indulgent nonsense . . . be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?"

The value of market research for magazine editors was highlighted in the weekly publication The Spectator. A market survey showed that 24% of the magazine’s readership felt that there was too much of a focus on sports in the publication. At the time of the study, there was no sports coverage in the periodical whatsoever.

With the advent of desktop publishing technology, many new low-budget magazines were launched. The scores of new 1996 titles included Go, a minipostcard-size magazine with short articles on fashion, film, and music; Biblio, an overview of books and manuscripts for collectors; Searcher, a magazine for database professionals; Double Take, an impressive literary review; and George, a general-interest title for young professionals. A May New York Times survey indicated that Reader’s Digest was consistently among the world’s top three magazines.

The winners of the year’s National Magazine Award included Business Week for general excellence and The New Yorker for reporting and essays. For the second consecutive year, GQ won the feature-writing medal, and a newcomer, Saveur--a food magazine--gathered two awards, one for photography and the other for special-interest articles. Harper’s won the fiction award.

Marketing magazine subscriptions by means of sweepstakes in the mail did not fare as well in 1996 as it had in previous years. Publisher’s Clearing House reported that new subscribers brought in by their mailings declined by an estimated 20-30%. Marketing experts believed this falloff was due to a rise in legalized gambling and general consumer boredom with sweepstakes.

BOOK PUBLISHING

While the Net Book Agreement (NBA) all but completely collapsed in the U.K., during 1996--in part because of the threat posed by a flood of cheap U.S. titles coming from The Netherlands--Belgium, Greece, Italy, and Portugal all either strengthened existing restrictions on discounted books or considered introducing such books to their marketplaces for the first time. The Netherlands extended its temporary system for fixing prices for another 10 years. A final verdict on the status of the NBA would not be decided by the Restrictive Practices Court until January 1997.

In the U.K. the discounting of non-Net books was more sporadic than expected, and supermarkets did not make much effort to increase market shares. As a result, few independent bookstores were forced to shut down, though publishers’ profits continued to be reduced by rising paper costs, higher authors’ royalties, and lower wholesale prices. Hodder Headline, for example, issued a warning about reduced profits in May, which caused its stock price to fall to just over half its value in 1995.

Considerable restructuring took place in the U.K. during the year. In December 1995 Microsoft Corp. sold its 18% stake in Dorling Kindersley after the latter’s stock value had risen nearly eightfold since 1991. In February 1996 Pearson agreed to pay $580 million for the educational publishing interests of Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishing group, and in May Reader’s Digest put Davis & Charles up for sale. In June CINVen, a venture capital company, acquired Routledge from the Thomson Corp. for $42 million, and Macmillan bought media tie-in publisher Boxtree. Alison and Busby was acquired by the Spanish newspaper group Editorial Prensa Iberica during July. Reed Elsevier in August expanded its legal-publishing business with the $150 million purchase of Tolley from United News and Media. Reed took its Consumer Books division off the market in March 1996, however, after failing to obtain a satisfactory price in light of the collapse of the NBA. Elsewhere in Europe, Piper Verlag of Germany acquired Malik Verlag, and Hachette of France bought Hatier, the third largest educational publisher, for an estimated 500 million francs. As a result, Hachette and Groupe de la Cité controlled 85% of the French educational book market.

Companies such as Penguin Books built up their stock of titles converted from print to CD-ROM but found it difficult to add sufficient value to the product in order to justify a price of about $75 (with the book itself generally a free bonus). They accordingly put their multimedia activity on hold in July, only two years after the project began--as had HarperCollins in June and Reed International in October 1995. Publishers Burda of Germany and Pearson also encountered problems with electronic publishing when Europe Online filed for bankruptcy in August 1996.

Scandal broke out in the anthropology community after Cambridge University Press decided not to publish an already accepted text on Macedonian history, fearing for the safety of its staff members in Greece. Along with three academic advisers, many writers chose to boycott the press for being too reactionary and denying the author of the manuscript the right to free speech. Peter Curwen

It was not surprising that in 1996, an election year, two books of a political nature took centre stage in the United States. Primary Colors (Random House), a novel whose characters were thinly disguised caricatures of Pres. Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, made a rapid climb up the New York Times best-seller list. Its long run on the list, however, was due mainly to the mystery surrounding the unknown author. Because of the amount of insider information contained in the book, the author was rumoured to be a top government official. Magazines and newspapers devoted columns to analyzing the writing patterns and use of imagery, and many hazarded guesses as to the author’s true identity. New York magazine speculated that it was Joe Klein, Newsweek’s political columnist, which prompted Klein to write a column denying the accusation. When a Washington Post reporter obtained a copy of the original manuscript, the newspaper had the handwriting analyzed and confirmed that the author was, indeed, Klein. The discovery set off a storm of criticism targeted at Klein, who many said had breached journalistic ethics by lying about his true identity in print.

Hillary Clinton had her say with the January publication of her book, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (Simon & Schuster). Taking as its premise the African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child," Clinton discussed family issues and social policies. The book reached the number 1 spot on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list in its first week of publication. All profits from the book were donated to children’s hospitals.

Actress and novelist Joan Collins also set the publishing industry abuzz about her legal battle with Random House. The former star of television’s "Dynasty" had previously published two novels with Simon & Schuster before being lured to Random House by a $4 million deal for two novels. The company had paid Collins a reported $1.3 million when she submitted her first manuscript, but it then deemed the work unpublishable and sued to recover the money. Collins countersued, demanding the full $4 million. A jury concluded that she had met the terms of her agreement by delivering the first manuscript. The decision was seen as a major victory for writers. Random House announced that it would appeal the decision.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ended a 17-year investigation into publishers’ pricing and promotional practices. Begun in 1979, the probe received new energy in 1982 when the American Booksellers Association (ABA) and 20 regional associations sent resolutions to Congress asking for the funding for further investigation. In 1988 six major publishers--Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hearst, Harper & Row, and Putnam Berkley--were charged with illegal pricing practices that favoured bookstore chains over independent bookstores. In 1992, although the six cited publishers agreed to modify some pricing practices, the agreements were not ratified by the full FTC. The FTC dismissed the pricing cases in September 1996 without reaching a decision about whether any of the publishers had engaged in illegal activity. The commission stated that further investigation "would not be a prudent use of scarce public resources."

The 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Richard Ford, author of Independence Day (Alfred A. Knopf). Tina Rosenberg won in the general nonfiction category for The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism (Random House). Fiction best-sellers for 1995, as reported by Publishers Weekly, were The Rainmaker by John Grisham (2,375,000 copies), The Lost World by Michael Crichton (1,730,691), and Five Days in Paris by Danielle Steel (1,550,000). Nonfiction best-sellers were Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray (2,196,935), My American Journey by Colin Powell with Joseph Persico (1,538,469), and Miss America by Howard Stern (1,398,880). Total book sales in the U.S. rose 5% in 1995 to $19.8 billion. The National Book Award for fiction went to Andrea Barrett for her collection of tales Ship Fever and Other Stories, for nonfiction to James Carroll for An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, and for poetry to Hayden Carruth for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey:Poems1991-1995, and the newly created prize for young people’s literature went to Victor Martinez for Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida. Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, received the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.